The Second Best Zombie Movie Of All Time

Rating: 9/10 (31 January 2020)

Danny Boyle's flexibility as director is just so consistently surprising. You know what his next film after this was? After this, 'The Beach', 'Trainspotting' and 'Shallow Grave' before it? 'Millions', the Frank Cottrell Boyce penned kids book about a 7 year old finding a million pounds in a duffel bag. I don't always like his films, but I must hand it to the man, there aren't many spaces he can't fill.
The direction here looks a little dated now, it feels very guerilla, very DIY from the offset (it wasn't, it had a healthy budget from Fox on their pseudo indie-label Fox Searchlight Pictures). The rawness works in the film's favour most of the time and is entirely appropriate given the genre.
Perfectly contrasting this, there are moments in this movie that are so well timed and so well framed that they are nothing short of iconic. They gleam like diamonds in all of the gloom, and are so satisfyingly on the nose that they're almost Expressionist. They give the viewer more than a moment's pause and Boyle shows great instincts on when to let run what other people might dismiss as B-roll footage. A girl running down a dark hallway in a ballgown, a body falling down a tenement staircase, a sole plane flying over a forest after all civilization is supposedly dead, and let's not forget what we all came for in 2003, a man in hospital scrubs wandering an empty, abandoned London. The latter was nothing short of movie magic in those days, when fully rendered CGI environments were a thing reserved only for the absolute biggest of Hollywood blockbuster movies.
Writer Alex Garland had at this point half proven himself to be a contender with 'The Beach' novel and screenplay, and he must have been hungry for another win. Where 'The Beach' was grounded in reality, specifically the experience of being young, dumb and full of cumbersome desire to travel and find oneself, descending then into flight of fancy, '28 Days Later...' takes people out of their world and into one Garland built himself, utterly horrific as it is. His dialogue takes a back-step in favour of a more tense and realistic silence (for practical reasons), which leaves him to play with and plot bigger scenarios and ultimately bigger themes. What he delivered was brutal, very concise and utterly convincing.
Performances are just great really, across the board. Brendan Gleeson plays against type very nicely, Naomie Harris plays to type very well, a 26 year old Cillian Murphy acts his freaking socks off, and the film is gracefully cradled towards it's ending with the measured and self-assuredness of the always wonderful Christopher Eccleston, who stands guard like Nero, on the doorstop of his home town as it burns to crisp behind him.
My goodness. It is a good film, and yes! You were right! The First Best Zombie Movie of all time IS George A. Romero's 'Dawn of the Dead'! Thank you and goodnight. '28 Days Later...' is a very close second.